After the Party

When a decadelong worldwide architecture party comes to a sudden crashing halt—lights on, stop your cranes, everyone out—what comes next? A sheepish walk homeward? A hangover? If MOS—this year’s winner of the Museum of Modern Art and P.S. 1‘s Young Architects Program to remake P.S. 1’s Long Island City courtyard—has its way, there’s more celebration yet to come.

Still, the firm’s design, afterparty, is less cheery than those of recent years, with a gray Bedouin-inspired conical city that will poke up well above the museum’s walls. MoMA’s chief curator of architecture and design, Barry Bergdoll, calls it “a return to basics.” Partygoers at the summerlong Warm Up dance parties will be able to escape the heat in MOS’s lightweight recyclable aluminum-frame structures, which employ au courant passive-cooling techniques. It’s a little less postapocalyptic than what I might have come up with, but you probably can’t win these types of competitions with a scheme for repurposed junkyards and packs of feral dogs.